Bliss is committed to supporting innovations in neonatal care that will see further increases in survival rates and improvements in quality of life for all babies born sick or premature.

We have identified the growth of developmental care as an exciting and potentially important advance in neonatal care and are engaged in a number of projects to promote training in developmental care and to highlight the potential benefits of this approach to care.

Developmental care is a broad category of interventions designed to minimise the stress of the NICU environment and to support the behavioural organisation of each individual infant. Interventions are designed to enhance physiological stability, protect sleep rhythms and promote growth and maturation.

These may include handling and postitioning measures, reduction of harmful stimuli (such as noise and light), clustering of nursery care activities, and cue-based care.  Education and involvement of parents – acknowledging that they are the most important people in the infant’s life and critical to the infant’s emotional, social and physical wellbeing – is a crucial part of family-centred developmental care.

Current initiatives include:

• We are supporting four practitioners to take part in full accredited training in the NIDCAP approach to developmental care.

• We have set up a developmental care special interest and support group for neonatal practitioners the UK. This group is open to anyone with an interest in promoting developmental care within their unit. Through the group Bliss is providing a forum through which good practice and learning experiences can be shared.

• We are working with a number of units, looking at the ways in which they are delivering developmental care training to their staff and learning from them about how training can be made most effective.

For more information on Bliss’ Developmental Care programme please contact Jane Abbott at janea@bliss.org.uk

Click here to link to the Developmental Care forum on the Bliss message board.